


Time Sneeze

by Satchelfoot



Category: Farscape
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-29
Updated: 2020-01-29
Packaged: 2021-02-19 00:20:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22468855
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Satchelfoot/pseuds/Satchelfoot
Summary: Moya has caught an infection with time-frelling symptoms, but only she knows it.
Relationships: Moya (Farscape) & Pilot (Farscape)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 20
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2019





	Time Sneeze

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tanaqui](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanaqui/gifts).



One solar day, Moya’s Starburst drive implodes, causing her to curl around herself in an impossible knot that destroys her and her crew in one one-thousandth of a microt.

* * *

One solar day, Moya finds herself still alive, twelve arns before the moment of her destruction. She checks on her crew. Pilot is doing exactly what he was doing at this time, flying past that red dwarf with the unusual, tachyon-heavy radiation signature. He takes detailed readings of the star for further study. Just as she did before, Moya feels a welling of affection for the poor sweet boy: he’s been trying so hard to be a good pilot, a great pilot, _the best_ pilot, since he began making his new organic connection with her. She’s tried to reassure him that there’s no need to prove his worthiness, that they already share a deep connection, that she knows he has both the skill and the intelligence to do truly great work with her, and that she does not and will not ever blame him for the death of his predecessor. (She has not told him how much she sometimes misses her first pilot, that lovely, soft-smelling creature who bonded so deeply with her and tried to protect her; some feelings do not need to be shared, perhaps ever.) At least, without the pain of the forced, grafted connection, he now has more mental energy to spend satisfying his curiosity about cosmic phenomena like that strange star. To her considerable interest and mystification, he shows no sign of alarm that would suggest he remembers combusting into tiny particles just moments ago. She moves on.

Near-Pilot, the Sebacean who still carries Pilot’s DNA, is speaking with Not-PK, the one with a strange, sloppy variation on Sebacean physiology, both of them still enmeshed in their long, complicated mating dance. Moya, who has hosted plenty of Peacekeeper copulations in her crew quarters, wonders again why coupling seems to be such a drawn-out process for these two. Maybe it’s something to do with Not-PK’s deficient genes. 

From there, she checks on Good Touch, the nurturing one who more closely resembles a plant than a carbon biped; Hardfoot, who always creates a rather pleasant stomping vibration when he strides along Moya’s corridors; Godmother, the newest one, who helped bring Talyn safely into the universe; and Storage, who is currently moving another object to his quarters from someone else’s. (Moya has never quite understood the disturbances that so often result from Storage’s accumulation of objects in his quarters: moving things to his living area is clearly a natural part of his function, and everything he takes is still within Moya, so why should it matter exactly where all the things are kept? Like many finer points of emotion among the crew, their investment in limiting certain objects to specific areas does not make a great deal of sense to her.)

In any case, all seems well as far as her crewmembers are concerned. No one remembers dying in a blaze of light. For the next twelve arns, everything happens just as it did before. Then Moya’s Starburst drive implodes and the gravity of the detonation causes her to twist herself into an impossible knot that destroys her and her crew in one one-thousandth of a microt. No one but her even has time to register that anything is wrong before they’re gone.

* * *

One solar day, Moya finds herself twelve arns ahead of the moment of her destruction. She tells Pilot about the situation and he alerts the others. Pilot and Near-Pilot theorize that the atypical tachyon buildup in the red dwarf that Moya is about to fly past may be responsible for both the implosion and the time loops. As such, Pilot swings wide of the strange star and its radiation. Not-PK makes one of his esoteric references to something called a “Starship Bozeman”.

However, ten arns later, Moya’s Starburst drive implodes and the gravity of the detonation causes her to twist herself into an impossible knot that destroys her and her crew in one one-thousandth of a microt.

* * *

One solar day, Moya is alive and as well as one might reasonably expect, given that she has experienced her own instantaneous destruction at least three times, but this time-looping business has become rather tedious. She informs Pilot of the situation, again, and constructs a brief animated presentation that her DRDs play to the crew. (The presentation contains some rather nifty light-bending effects showing the implosion of the Starburst drive and the resulting total loss of life for all concerned—Moya is quite proud of it.)

It is determined, once more, that Moya has been affected by tachyon radiation from the strange red dwarf, which is both destabilizing the Starburst drive and creating a localized temporal anomaly. The residue from the radiation remains with her from one loop to the next, so it no longer matters if she passes close to the star or avoids it in any subsequent loop—the results will be the same. Not-PK posits that Moya has caught a “stellar headcold” and is “time-sneezing”; she doesn’t really know what that means but chooses not to be offended.

The only viable path forward is to scrub the radiation out of Moya’s system before the Starburst drive has a chance to overload and self-destruct. Unfortunately, the crew has just used up twelve arns figuring out what the frell is going on. Moya’s Starburst drive implodes and the gravity of the detonation causes her to twist herself into an impossible knot that destroys her and her crew in one one-thousandth of a microt.

* * *

One day, Moya irritably pokes Pilot in the middle of his routine systems checks to inform him that she has been looping back in time at the moment of her destruction. The temporal displacement and the repeated cellular disassembly of her entire being are eroding her patience and perhaps her sanity. She unloads a mighty infodump on him to explain all that has gone before and then uses her DRDs to corral the rest of the crew, giving them a short and sloppy explanation. Not-PK jokes about “time sneezes”, again, for the first time, and then yelps when a DRD shoots a low-powered laser bolt at his ankle.

The crew immediately get to work, using large, unwieldy radiation scrubbers to cleanse the tachyons from Moya’s system. Just before her Starburst drive implodes and the gravity of the detonation causes her to twist herself into an impossible knot, Moya estimates that her atypical stellar radiation index has been reduced by 25.8 percent. Then she and her crew are destroyed in one one-thousandth of a microt.

* * *

One day, Moya finds herself only nine hours ahead of the moment of her destruction. She barely bothers to explain the situation to Pilot and the rest of the crew before putting them on tachyon removal duty. By the time she feels herself twisted into an impossible knot, her atypical stellar radiation index is down by another 27.9 percent. Dying in one one-thousandth of a microt barely even hurts anymore.

* * *

One day, Moya has a little under six hours to put her crew to work on tachyon removal. Hardfoot questions what possible harm could come from such a small concentration of atypical stellar radiation; she zaps one of his tenkas with a DRD laser by way of response. By the time they all die in a Starburst flash, nearly all the tachyon residue is cleaned away.

* * *

One day, Moya is tired. So tired. In three hours, she knows, she will implode once again. But she checks her tachyon levels, and she is _so close_ to getting out of this frelling time loop. She informs Pilot, the DRDs brief the rest of the crew, and they all get to work. Two minutes before the Starburst drive will implode, Pilot confirms that Moya’s entire surface and interior are free of atypical tachyon radiation. The two minutes go by. Nothing is destroyed at all. 

Hardfoot grumbles. Not-PK wonders what all the fuss was about. Moya has a DRD roll up to him and chitter something about time sneezes. But Pilot and Good Touch can sense that their ship is exhausted. She powers down most of her DRDs and puts her nonessential systems into rest mode.

* * *

The next solar day, Moya is ready to talk to Pilot about visiting strange stars again.


End file.
